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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    Default The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    I mean it is.

    Pi is the same value everywhere.

    Gravity has the same constant everywhere.

    There's no magic.

    There are 1,000,000,000 stars per galaxy, and 1,000,000,000 galaxies, and most of space is space between galaxies, not in them.

    The whole thing is just ridiculous.

    It's huge beyond any definition of huge, it doesn't trancend finite, but it pushes it hard.
    The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    Pi is the same value everywhere.

    Gravity has the same constant everywhere.

    There's no magic.
    [Citation needed]
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    There are 1,000,000,000 stars per galaxy, and 1,000,000,000 galaxies, and most of space is space between galaxies, not in them.
    Your numbers here are actually too low. There's something like 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) solar masses worth of stuff in the Milky Way galaxy, which like translates into more than 100 billion stars. Black holes and supergiants account for some of it, but the average star is a red dwarf with considerably less than 1 solar mass. The Milky Way is a mid-sized galaxy, some will have more stars (Andromeda may have 1 trillion solar masses worth of stuff), while others will have less (the Triangulum galaxy is smaller, perhaps only 40 billion solar masses). The average is unclear and it depends on which kind of galaxies you're counting.

    The estimated number of galaxies has been subject to a lot of recent change, but the most current estimate is 200,000,000,000 (200 billion).

    Yes, it's really big.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    There are perhaps about as many atoms in a person as stars in the universe, so scales of things in general in the real world can be pretty crazy. Also to give an idea of the emptiness of things, despite there being about as many atoms in a person as stars in the universe, there's ~30 orders of magnitude difference in volume between an atom and a person, but there's ~51 orders of magnitude between the volume of a star and the volume of the universe.

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    " Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    And that's just the observable universe. The universe may be literally infinitely bigger, for all we know.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
    I mean it is.

    Pi is the same value everywhere.

    Gravity has the same constant everywhere.

    There's no magic.

    There are 1,000,000,000 stars per galaxy, and 1,000,000,000 galaxies, and most of space is space between galaxies, not in them.

    The whole thing is just ridiculous.

    It's huge beyond any definition of huge, it doesn't trancend finite, but it pushes it hard.
    And that's just within our cosmic horizon, it most likely keeps going and is orders of magnitude larger than we can see.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mastikator View Post
    And that's just within our cosmic horizon, it most likely keeps going and is orders of magnitude larger than we can see.
    Actually, quite probably not.

    I think current understanding is tha the big bang happened at a point which then exanded - both in terms of the distance between matter created at the point, and said matter moving apart. What that means is that there could easily be a limit to how far the matter has spread - and futher, that could well mean that there is a limit to how far space has actually spread.

    So, what happens if you "travel" beyond where the matter (and space) reach? I don't think they have ruled out the universe being closed - so if, in a frozen "moment" one "measued" the distance the universe goes in a direction, one might well find the straight line measured extends all the way back to the origin.

    The universe is huge, but that hugeness only goes so far - and currently that is on the order of billions of years (or possibly tens thereof). At this age, enough time has happened for all for the elements needed to crete stuff to have been made by supernovas and then gathered back together to make new planets etc. - there's no evidence that it goes futher.

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    It's quite reasonable to define a measure of pi that is nonconstant in space. Let pi(r, x, y, z) be the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle of radius r with center (x, y, z), then this pi function varies over the entire universe based on the curvature of space at each point, and indeed at each point over all values of r > 0. Really it's just a complicated expression for gravity, but if you're in the business of grandiose space architecture it may be relevant.

    This is why pi is usually defined as either the circumference/diameter ratio of a circle in Euclidean space, or more commonly as the limit of a number of different infinite series.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Khedrac View Post
    Actually, quite probably not.

    I think current understanding is tha the big bang happened at a point which then exanded - both in terms of the distance between matter created at the point, and said matter moving apart. What that means is that there could easily be a limit to how far the matter has spread - and futher, that could well mean that there is a limit to how far space has actually spread.
    This viewpoint does nothing to rule out an arbitrarily large (or infinite) universe, fwiw.

    So, what happens if you "travel" beyond where the matter (and space) reach? I don't think they have ruled out the universe being closed - so if, in a frozen "moment" one "measued" the distance the universe goes in a direction, one might well find the straight line measured extends all the way back to the origin.
    The observable universe is almost certainly not closed as it would have a discernable curvature; the observable universe has zero curvature as far as we can tell, in a global sense. Obviously local regions of space can be quite curved. (It is possible that our observable universe isn't large enough to observe any curvature of the full universe, though this would necessarily imply that our observable universe is only a small fraction of the whole. This is currently an open area of research.) Additionally, questions about "travelling beyond space and time" are basically in the domain of philosophy, as (almost by definition) no measurements can be taken.

    The universe is huge, but that hugeness only goes so far - and currently that is on the order of billions of years (or possibly tens thereof). At this age, enough time has happened for all for the elements needed to crete stuff to have been made by supernovas and then gathered back together to make new planets etc. - there's no evidence that it goes futher.
    This applies to the visible universe, but simply assuming that the Earth is not the center of the overall universe (the Earth is at the center of the visible universe by definition) suggests that there is more out there than we can see, with nothing to suggest that it stops at any point. Though to be fair, there isn't anything that says how much larger it would be.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Khedrac View Post
    Actually, quite probably not.

    I think current understanding is tha the big bang happened at a point which then exanded - both in terms of the distance between matter created at the point, and said matter moving apart. What that means is that there could easily be a limit to how far the matter has spread - and futher, that could well mean that there is a limit to how far space has actually spread.

    So, what happens if you "travel" beyond where the matter (and space) reach? I don't think they have ruled out the universe being closed - so if, in a frozen "moment" one "measued" the distance the universe goes in a direction, one might well find the straight line measured extends all the way back to the origin.

    The universe is huge, but that hugeness only goes so far - and currently that is on the order of billions of years (or possibly tens thereof). At this age, enough time has happened for all for the elements needed to crete stuff to have been made by supernovas and then gathered back together to make new planets etc. - there's no evidence that it goes futher.
    A few things...
    The Big Bang wasn't a point, it wasn't an explosion embedded in some already existing space. It was the creation of space-time itself. So basically ALL of space-time was filled with energy that eventually cooled enough to allow matter to freeze out. Anywhere there is space-time, there should be matter and energy.
    The Wikipedia article on the Big Bang has a good discussion.


    Second, inflation! It is almost certain that inflation grew space-time faster than the speed of light, so that there were volumes that were causally disconnected - they are far enough apart that light and gravity from one can't see the other till far into the future.

    It's still an open question what the actual shape of the universe is - but there is no theory that postulates there is an "edge" or area where there is space but no matter as you describe. The universe is not a big ball of matter embedded inside a larger volume of space.

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Khedrac View Post
    Actually, quite probably not.

    I think current understanding is tha the big bang happened at a point which then exanded - both in terms of the distance between matter created at the point, and said matter moving apart. What that means is that there could easily be a limit to how far the matter has spread - and futher, that could well mean that there is a limit to how far space has actually spread.

    So, what happens if you "travel" beyond where the matter (and space) reach? I don't think they have ruled out the universe being closed - so if, in a frozen "moment" one "measued" the distance the universe goes in a direction, one might well find the straight line measured extends all the way back to the origin.

    The universe is huge, but that hugeness only goes so far - and currently that is on the order of billions of years (or possibly tens thereof). At this age, enough time has happened for all for the elements needed to crete stuff to have been made by supernovas and then gathered back together to make new planets etc. - there's no evidence that it goes futher.
    There is actually evidence that the universe does not abruptly end at the edge of the cosmic horizon. For one the cosmic horizon is a moving target, every second more matter, more galaxies move outside the horizon and become causally separated from us. So we know there's more universe beyond it.
    Secondly we know there's more universe beyond it and was from the start due to dark flow. Matter that was inside the horizon during or before inflation interacted we still see. That matter is now outside the horizon and no longer causally linked, but the flow is still there.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow
    Due to the observation of flow out, but no flow in we can't assume that the volume outside the horizon is empty. If it was then there would be a "dark flow" inwards, and we have not observed that. So the universe is AT LEAST twice as big as we could possibly see.

    Based on these three pieces of evidence we can not assume that the universe ends where we see it end. It may be closed but even then it would be far far larger than the cosmic horizon indicates. It's bigger than 84 billion light years. I'd put my money on no less than ten times that.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Citation provided, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

    “Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen...”

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Obligatory song reference.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mastikator View Post
    Due to the observation of flow out, but no flow in we can't assume that the volume outside the horizon is empty. If it was then there would be a "dark flow" inwards, and we have not observed that. So the universe is AT LEAST twice as big as we could possibly see.
    There's been one calculation by which the total diameter of the universe has to be at least 250 times greater than the observable universe. Which comes out to 65 million times the volume.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    There's been one calculation by which the total diameter of the universe has to be at least 250 times greater than the observable universe. Which comes out to 65 million times the volume.
    This I think was based on curvature measurement and the reasonable assumption that the universe has no edge, which is a consequence of the assumption that on a large enough scale the universe is the same everywhere.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    And ours is just an average-sized universe.

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Democratus View Post
    And ours is just an average-sized universe.
    For a statistical sample of 1.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    The Milky Way Galaxy is around 2 million light years across.
    That's 2,000,000 light years.
    That's around 4.4 billion times the distance between the Sun and Neptune.
    That's around 126 billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

    The Milky Way Galaxy (and other local galaxies) are between 10 million light years and 65 million light years from other "local" galaxy clusters.
    Not counting Andromeda which is planning on running into the Milky Way sometime in the next several billion years or so, meaning it's a bit close.

    From there, we have the Laniakea Supercluster, at around 560 million light years across. Past that, things start to spread out a little. So yes, when 65,000,000 light years of empty space is considered "compact and close together" relative to other astronomical scales, we start talking about REALLY BIG dimensions of space.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by erikun View Post
    The Milky Way Galaxy is around 2 million light years across.
    That's 2,000,000 light years.
    Not quite that big. The stellar disc is at most 200,000 light years across, and the Dark Matter Halo is approximately 200,000 parsecs across (652,000 light years across).


    There might be a dark matter disc close to 2 million light years across - but it's only recent simulations that suggest it might exist, and it hasn't exactly been confirmed.

    The "hot gas halo" is estimated to be on the order of 600,000 light years across as well.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Before we appreciate the massiveness of the universe, can we reflect on a moment on how utterly massive the sun is? It's 1.3 Million times larger than Earth and is effectively 99.8% of the matter in the solar system. There is absolutely nothing we can do to the sun, and even a slight change to it can have massive impacts on us.

    Nothing we've ever done matters to the sun, nothing we can do matters to the sun, and I strongly doubt we'll ever be able to do anything that matters to the sun.
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Forum Explorer View Post
    Nothing we've ever done matters to the sun, nothing we can do matters to the sun, and I strongly doubt we'll ever be able to do anything that matters to the sun.
    Sunshine LIED to us!

    But on a more serious note, 1 solar mass is 2×10^30 kg. Jupiter is 0.1% solar mass. And Jupiter is 318 Earth masses...
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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Forum Explorer View Post
    Before we appreciate the massiveness of the universe, can we reflect on a moment on how utterly massive the sun is? It's 1.3 Million times larger than Earth and is effectively 99.8% of the matter in the solar system. There is absolutely nothing we can do to the sun, and even a slight change to it can have massive impacts on us.

    Nothing we've ever done matters to the sun, nothing we can do matters to the sun, and I strongly doubt we'll ever be able to do anything that matters to the sun.
    All of that (except that one day a human derived species may well have sufficient tech power to affect the Sun), and the Sun is not a particularly massive star, there are smaller, and there are bigger.
    The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.

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    Default Re: The universe/cosmos is ridiculously, monotonously, immensely huge.

    Quote Originally Posted by Forum Explorer View Post
    Nothing we've ever done matters to the sun, nothing we can do matters to the sun, and I strongly doubt we'll ever be able to do anything that matters to the sun.
    We said the same thing about the Earth's weather patterns.

    Heck, we said the same thing about the trees on the American frontier, until they were all chopped down after a few decades.
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